New Year, New Radio. And not just any old wireless. It’s one of the latest digital wonders, which has inside its chic black casing a mini-computer that can whisk me round the world in a matter of seconds to visit tens of thousands of radio stations. For reasons that are as yet beyond me, though, I’ve only succeeded so far in travelling straight to Z, with no idea how to get back through the alphabet, not having a tame teenager on site to show me the way. (The instruction manual can of course only be accessed on computer and is written in a language some way between Urdu and Mandarin.) ‘Z’ has given me Zevox, Zhenzhou, Zeilsteen, Zeta, Zuidoost Brabant and Zoo, and I’ve travelled vicariously (or rather virtually) from Paris to Thessalonica by way of China, Holland and Belgium. The strange thing is I needn’t have bothered since everywhere (or at least everywhere in Z-land) sounds exactly the same: cheesy pop lyrics accompanied either by thrashing guitars or sobbing violins. If I ever make it out of Z and back to C and Chicago Public Radio, where I’ve heard there’s a really good talk programme, I’ll let you know.
Meantime there’s always Radio Four’s version of Sir Terry to enchant the ear and elucidate the mind. On a special week-long In Our Time Sir Melvyn, or rather Lord Bragg, has been guiding us through the history of the Royal Society, which is celebrating 350 years since its foundation in 1660 as a gentleman’s club for the promotion of physics, mathematics and experimental learning. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking have all been Fellows of the Society that has given us blood transfusions, electricity, breadfruit and pulsars. Driven by their insatiable curiosity about the world around them, those first Fellows met once a week in the late afternoon to hear lectures and watch demonstrations of the latest discoveries, led by the first ‘curator of experiments’ Robert Hooke, whose Micrographia so brilliantly combines artistic flair with scientific precision.
‘Can I just get the character of this meeting even more finely described?’ asks Melvyn, concerned to keep his listeners from diverting to Zuidoost Brabant. He needn’t have worried. This was such exciting stuff. The original Fellows, we heard, were a fascinatingly mixed bunch (no women, though), some of whom had been abroad, living in Bremen and Maastricht to avoid imprisonment under Cromwell for their Royalist sympathies. Others were Cromwellians who adjusted themselves to fit the new world order of the Restoration. All were dedicated to experimentation and the desire to map not just what they could see but also the space beyond, using the newly invented telescopes, microscopes and barometers.
It’s hard to imagine a society now in which experimentation was all about discovering the wonder of nature rather than our own dystopian nightmare of SIM cards, hard drives and Game Boy. Midway through, I hit the pause button to look up Newton on Wikipedia, only to discover it was Newton’s birthday, celebrated by Google with a brilliant moving graphic, dropping a glossy red apple across the face of my computer. Mind-blowing in its sheer cleverness, and yet somehow…
Newton, we were told, was a miserable man who fell out with virtually everyone around him, but he rarely missed a meeting of the Society, one week observing the dissection of a dolphin just washed up in the Thames and the next a demonstration of friction. The meetings brought him into the company of other men with other ideas, different interests. Would he, I wonder, have had such creative vision if he had spent his days transfixed by an LED screen across which apples dropped as if by magic?
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